The TUI Group, the world`s largest tourist company is moving some of its hotel technology to its own in-house blockchain.

“TUI has started to work with the innovative Blockchain technology. The Group’s hotel inventory has been transferred into a blockchain in order to for example manage it more efficiently.”, as TUI explained.

TUI Group is a multinational travel company with 1,600 travel agencies and leading online portals under its umbrella, six touristic airlines with around 150 aircraft, as well as over 300 hotels with 214,000 beds, 16 cruise liners and countless incoming agencies , as they explained on their website.

The company had a reported revenue of nearly $20 billion in 2016 and is now led by chief executive Friz Joussen.

According to a local publication at tnooz (tnooz.com), Joussen is convinced that Blockchain technology will dominate B2B within five to ten years. He also speaks about the company`s technology initiative named BedSwap:

“Blockchain enables TUI to shift its owned hotel inventory between different points of sale according to the demand it is seeing and can flex its selling margins accordingly. This is made possible by ‘integrating’ TUI’s yield systems with the Blockchain.”, as the article pointed out.

TUI is reportedly using blockchain technology to manage hotel rooms, but not all aspects of the supply chain have been integrated, as Skift (skift.com) reported.

“It’s a smart contract blockchain. So we have all our contracts on the block chain, and we use it for hotel swapping. We have embedded it, we have coupled it to our yield systems, so the yield system determines where we want to sell the beds.”, as Joussen told the online media.

The idea is to put its full inventory onto the blockchain and then connect this up to the purchasing and property management systems, as Skift wrote.

Here is a video showing how TUI plans to benefit from using Blockchain technology.